This, or some such, according to the distinguished 20th century philosopher, Anthony Flew, may have set Locke to wondering about the “problem” and puzzles of personal identity. Since that pre-Darwinian epoch, myriads of volumes have passed under the bridge of scholars and scientists, in every department of knowledge, in the attempt to solve the “problem” of personal identity.
Locke thought the problem important: “In this problem of ‘personal identity,’ ” says Locke, “is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment…” Flew comments, “That is to say, it is never fair to blame nor just to punish the prisoner in the dock for murdering his bride in her bath unless the prisoner is the same person as he who did the deed. The same is equally true of the ascription of responsibility at the Last Judgment.”
Locke attacked the problem by trying to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions that would have to hold in order that the expression, “same person” would be correctly applied. His solution to the problem, in the “Essay” is: “That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as consciousness reaches, and no further; as everyone who reflects will perceive.” The notion of “join itself with” is generally taken to refer to self-conscience awareness of memory. In other words, Locke’s “solution” becomes: X at time two (T2) is the ‘same person’ as Y at time one (T1) if and only if X and Y are both persons and X can remember at time two (T2) his or her doing (feeling, seeing, etc.) what Y did at time one (T1).
Critics of the time were quick to point out that this was no “solution” at all. Locke was committing a “petitio principii,” that is, “begging the question,” in that he presupposes personal identity in trying to define it. As Bishop Butler exclaimed, “consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity.” If you remember doing something, you tacitly presuppose you are the same person who remembers. As Flew notes, “It is absurd to say that ‘he is the same person’ means that ‘he can remember that he is the same person.’ ”
Basing personal identity on memory runs into other problems. For example, memory is not transitive. Let A, B, and C represent the time slices of a person as an adult, as an adolescent, and as a child, respectively. Then A may remember something B did, and B may remember something C did, but A may not remember something C did, as a child. Then, according to Locke we would have two different persons, AB and BC, but no ABC. In addition, what about cases of amnesia, paramnesia, or other pathological conditions? Is it not the same person that suffers such conditions the same who does not suffer? And what about self-deception or people who “remember” things that never happened? Memory is a difficult subject, short and long term varieties; a mixture of fantasy, imagination, and wishful thinking filling in the gaps of forgetfulness. Thus the past is always changing, providing no solid ground on which build the foundation of personal identity.
Locke’s definition of a “person” runs into similar difficulties. In the “Essay” he says that a “person” is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.” On the other hand, this is distinguished from the “idea” of “man” when he says, “the idea in our minds, of which the sound ‘man’ is the sign, is nothing else but of an animal of such a certain form.” In this sense the same “man” can be different “persons,” as we say of someone who has made a radical change, “wow, you are a totally different person (but the same man).” Or contra wise, when it is said, “Join the Marines, we will make a new man out of you (but the same person).” So which is it, many persons in one or one in many?
The confusions Locke encountered where due, I think, to the valiant attempt to devise a coherent picture out of two incompatible views he inherited concerning the nature of things. One was the Platonic-Cartesian notion of the immortal, immaterial “soul.” The other was the Democritian-Newtonian idea of a mechanistic material world of material particles or atoms. The former idea pictures each person as bearing an individual, unique “soul-substance.” The latter picture has no need for such mysterious entities as “souls.” All being and cognition is grounded in atoms of experience — the sensuous perception of momentary acts of consciousness. As Hume would go on to say, he felt himself totally at a loss as to “the nature of the bond which unites a person.” Such “bonds” or “soul-containers” were not to be encountered among data of sensation. Accordingly, the intellectual ship of empiricism runs aground smack in the middle of the reefs of the mind-body problem.
Nowadays, we look to science to provide answers to philosophical puzzles. There is DNA and Darwin. Here is the way that Edward O. Wilson puts it in “On Human Nature”: “It is tempting to think that deep within the brain lives a soul, a free agent that takes account of the body’s experience but travels around the cranium on its own accord, reflecting, planning, and pulling the levers of the neuromoter machinery…. [But]…if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent (and incorporeal) agent within the brain?”
Yet the debate goes on, because the problems run deep. Even as far back as the “Odyssey” we read of the ancient intuitions of the connections between soul, memory, life, death, forgetfulness. In Hades, where the “shades” of the dead heroes reside, they have lost their memories. Only by drinking the sacrificial blood are they able to recall episodes of their former life. Hans Gadamer remarks, in “The Beginning of Philosophy,” that “Death is the night of memory; without memories we die.” So each day we awake, we are born anew…
Puzzle
Can you arrange the numerals 1 to 9, in order, and using only parentheses, multiplication, and subtraction symbols such that the result of doing the arithmetic will be equal to the current year?
